Games Are For The Playing

Digging through a set of games in storage in my parents shed I found my old Battlemasters set from MB games. This was a somewhat weird artefact of the ~90s in that I believe it was supposed to be a gateway to Warhammer Fantasy Battle but had very little Games Workshop heraldry apart from the Citadel Minatures tag on the front. My copy never saw use beyond me setting it up and fiddling about with it myself as I went off down an Epic 40k route afterwards (Titans ftw).

Though my hoarding instincts had weakened sufficiently to part company with it, all the gamers I had known for a while were peers and long past this game into full on wargames of whatever sort. This could have been stripped for parts as my old Space Crusade was for 40k but for whatever reason, Battlemasters had stayed (relatively) complete.

Shiny TTRPG links #102

A round up of all I found over the tail end of the holidays. More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR or the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

David Hines tweets on Conan the Barbarian

Alex Schroeder gives us How to illustrate your own stuff

TardisCaptain's Blog of Holding gives us 5E players trying OSR for the first time

Some end of year look-backs:
Vague Countries crunches their game time gives us Year in Review – 2022 – Having a Normal One
Goblin's Henchman recaps Got a few things done in 2022

Plastic Polyhedra gives us Beginnings: #dungeon23, 2023 in gaming, and 2023 in blogging.

Attronarch's Athenaeum gives us Sale: Expeditious Retreat Press 20th anniversary sale

Axian Spice gives us New Year New Game Sale 2023: My OSR Recommendations

#Dungeon23 is well underway

The Treasures of the Shed

While back home for the holidays mention was made that "there are some black sacks in the shed with some boardgames" and I went out to see what was there. Short answer; treasure.

At a first look I was a bit concerned - genuine cobwebbed bin bags sitting on a shelf and I had no idea what they could be.

Campaign Spin-Up V - adding tension to your campaign location

Taking the challenge of Beginnings for the January 2023 RPG Blog Carnival from Of Dice and Dragons I want to talk about stacking gunpowder in the corners of a setting. For more on what this means see Wandering Gamist "Gisli's Saga and Boot Hill" on how one could set up a powderkeg for a campaign location.

I am testing this during the spin-up of a West Marches style campaign dubbed 'Southern Reaches' - set to the south of my existing Home Campaign. The original process is from Boot Hill and while I don't want to mimic the 'everything one step from murder' of that campaign I think we do want to bake in factions, goals and stakes folk might have. Somewhere I heard 'the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small' - even if we are looking for a generally non-lethal setting, one where the locals have views that the players might upset is better (for a sandbox) than 'dedicated villain'.

Back to our source: "what makes for good intrigue in a tabletop game?
- There must be many diverse agendas and moving parts to navigate.
- Players should know they should step carefully and never be certain how well they’re succeeding.
- They must feel the consequences of failure, but also that these fates are fair and not arbitrary."

From efforts so far using 'Downtime as Worldbuilding', map-reading and randomly generated city aspects and map elements we have a start on what this region is, and from the test of Deck of Worlds we have a few local elements.

The Boot Hill example is a 'high potential' unstable equilibrium - the slightest disruption and it is all going to turn into gunsmoke and arson. I think what I want for this game is a slightly more buried set of problems, ones that the locals will get sore about but not that will get people knifed in their sleep (not as a first response, in any case). From our Session Zero we have identified that the players want to start off operating out of a tavern on the edge of a wilderness, being a band of Merry Men. As the players will be newcomers to the locality, I am going to set things up as they were the day before they arrived and then let the consequences of the players actions domino from there.

So I need to comb through what has been generated and see how it all gels together. This could be seen as 'emergent faction building' from the world-building stages so far.

The things I want to establish are:
- Big personalities that get talked about locally - the power players small folk curse for their taxes or toast to their health.
- Agents of some of the big organisations - the faces the players will actually see.
- Some local players in the town of Balronco.

Shiny TTRPG links #101

First links round-up of 2023! More can be found on the previous list found here. The original inspiration for all of this - weaver.skepti.ch End of Week links. You can find even more links on the weekly blogroll on r/OSR or the RPG Blog Carnival or a roundup of non-blog news on Third Kingdom Games roundup.

A bunch of great challenges appeared:
Tales of the Lunar Lands gives us The Alternate Bulette Challenge
Of Dice and Dragons launches Beginnings – January 2023 RPG Blog Carnival
Bring Back Blogging has a Signup - and refers to all blogs.

#Dungeon23 kicks-off in a frenzy of activity:
BEARDED DEVIL returns with The Apocalypse Archive
Dungeon Year Design Journal gives us The Massive Tables Update
@thelostbay tweets a Catalog of Dungeon23 projects
Duvelman's Vault gives us A list of Resources for Building a Megadungeon for #dungeon23
Gizmodo has a piece Dungeon23 Is the Perfect Low-Pressure Writing Ritual
Weird Wonder reports Dungeon 23 Weeks 1 and 2
All Dead Generations shares Dungeon Design, Process and Keys
Source of Entropy has some lessons learned in Learning to draw a dungeon Grumpy Wizard gives us All the nerdy kids are doing #Dungeon23 and so can you! Silverarm shares Dungeon 23: My Procedure for Making A Megadungeon Sandbox

I swept up some city building sources while mulling (and dropping) a #City23 run
ANXIETY WIZARD gives us City Map System & Making a Spooky City
The Lizard Man Diaries gives us Fantasy Town Building Stocker (Travail Saga)

Methods & Madness does some thinking in Condensed information in an ocean of trash (and some thoughts about AI)

Vague Countries explains Running Xyntillan: Downtime

Breath of Mystara shares the magesterial Broken Lands Gazetteer Expansion

Year In Review 2022

We come to the end of the year and looking back 2022 was a pretty good year for gaming - faded a little off 2021 in pure hours but got almost the same number of sessions (59 vs 62) and got lot more different things done including the launch of another campaign and spun up a third.

On running things, got in 26 sessions, over half of them on the Ducal House (3.5e) campaign, the rest 50/50 between the Planescape Splinters (5e) one-shots and the Spelljammer (5e) campaign.

Ducal House (3.5e) - home campaign slowed way down due to scheduling but still ground through some high heroism, got in hex-crawling and labyrinth bashing, old school dealings with petty gods and giants and it is about to enter year 4 with momentum which is nice. Players are still keen as evidenced by the below piece of character art gifted by the bard to the cleric.

Planescape: Splinters (5e) was a series of one-shots on different plans (Mechanus, theBeastlands, Acheron) - usually got 2 sessions with different groups for each plane, much hilarity in how differently things go for the different tables, great to get back on the planes, lessons learned for me in session control time and setting up one-shots

I have to give a grudging star to Spelljammer 5e here because despite my serious gripes about the set, it is also the only WotC release that got a bunch of the old warriors to pull down their swords off the wall and commit to a campaign even before the book dropped - and we managed to follow through *and* after a 2-shot mini-game we've sustained that into running the campaign that came in the box. I've put in a bunch of elbow grease to throw a world I'm happy with around the set pieces from the campaign but the combo seems to be working well.

Actual Test: Downtime as Worldbuilding

In the back of the Downtime in Zyan zine, after the downtime actions, we get 10 prompts for prepping your campaign to help "develop your setting, create your starting community, and stock your map with sites of exploration and treasure that encourage the use of downtime activities." I reviewed Downtime in Zyan previously and decided to test out this workflow as a world-building tool.

The prompts, or steps to run through, are:
1. Institutions operating in the starting community where play begins.
2. Master artisans that currently reside there.
3. A rival adventuring party.
4. A secret location where spiritual exercises can be performed.
5. A secret location with a trove of otherwise inaccessible and valuable information.
6. A secret location where special revelry can be engaged in.
7. Some legendary institutions, now gone.
8. Some prolific master craftsmen of the distant past.
9. A tragically lost magical book.
10. A remarkable material that could be used to fashion splendid artifacts.

Downtime in Zyan, showing cover art by Evlyn Moreau